Havana Bay (12 page)

"When was the last time you saw Sergei Sergeevich?"

"A Friday after work. I had taken Carmen for an ice
cream on the Malecon when we ran into him talking
to a Cuban. I remember Carmen said that she heard
something roar, and Sergei Sergeevich said his neighbor
kept a lion that ate little girls. She became so irritable
we had to hurry home. Usually they did get on wonder
fully." When Arkady had her show him on a map she
pointed to the Malec6n in front of Pribluda's flat.»
Sergei Sergeevich wore a captain's cap and the Cuban
was carrying one of those enormous inner tubes they
fish from. A black man is all I remember."

"Did you hear a roar?"

"Something, maybe." As she put the albums away
she asked, "Do you think there's any truth to this story
that Sergei Sergeevich is dead?"

"I'm afraid there might be. Some of the Cuban
investigators are very competent."

"Dead of what?"

"A heart attack, they say."

"But you have some doubts?"

"I just like to be sure."

Olga Petrovna sighed. Even in her time in Havana the
city had become another Haiti. And Moscow was overrun by Chechens and gangs. Where could a person go?

 
He thought for a moment he had caught sight of a
man keeping pace behind him in the dark of the arcade. Was he being followed? He couldn't tell. It was hard to
single out a shadow when everyone knew which way the streets ran except you, when everyone looked in
place but you, with the sea on one side and on the
other a maze of demolition piles, cars hauled onto
sidewalks, lines of people waiting for ice cream, a bus, bread, water.

So he plunged on in his coat, drawing glances as if
he were a monk wandered off the Via Dolorosa.

 
Arkady took a taxi back to the Malecon and walked
the last few blocks to Pribluda's apartment past boys
demanding Chiclets and men offering
mulatas,
and
beyond conversation starters of
"Amiga, que hora es? De que pais? Momentico, amigo."
Overhead hung balconies,
arabesques of wrought-iron spikes and potted plants,
women in housedresses and men stripped to their
underwear and cigars, music shifting from window to
window. Decay everywhere, heat everywhere, faded
colors trying to hold together disintegrating plaster and
salt-eaten beams.

 
Chapter Six

Ofelia was Arkady and Dr. Bias played Rufo. They
positioned the tables and taped the floor of the IML
conference room to indicate the perimeters of the walls,
bookshelves and doors of the embassy flat so that they
could—for their own information—"reconstruct the
facts" of Rufo Pinero's death.

"Reconstruction of the facts" distinguished Cuban
forensic medicine from the American, Russian, German.
In Cuban laboratories, in Nicaraguan rain forests, in the
dusty fields of Angola, Bias had re-created homicides to
the amazement not only of judges but of the criminals
themselves. A reconstruction of the facts surrounding
the death of the Russian
neumatico
might be impossible
because of the drifting and deterioration of the body. Rufo's death, however, took place in an apartment, not
open water, and left certain irrefutable facts: Rufo's
body with an oversized arterial syringe in hand, a knife
with Rufo's prints stuck into a bookcase, no bruises on
the dead man's body, no disheveled clothes, no signs
that pointed to anything but a swift, fatal confrontation.

Nevertheless, the doctor was stymied and breathing
hard. They took into account that Rufo Pinero was a
former athlete, taller and heavier than Renko by twenty
kilos, maybe more. The Russian was exhausted by travel,
confused, clearly not athletic, though not totally obtuse. Bias thought that described Renko well enough.

They staged the attack in various ways. Rufo rising
from a chair, waiting in the room, entering the door.
No matter, wielding scissors and a pencil as a knife and
syringe, Bias didn't come close to efficiently or rapidly
dispatching Ofelia. Part of the problem was that she was
so fast afoot. Ofelia had run the hundred-meter dash at school and hardly gained a kilo since then. She had a
habit of shifting her weight from foot to foot that Bias
found annoying.

Another problem was that the attack spoke of sur
prise. Yet using both a "knife" and a "syringe" made
Bias slow and unwieldy. The simple act of bringing out
not one but two weapons gave a victim time to react.
Rufo would have been led laps around the room and
table and chairs would have flown in all directions had
Ofelia been the intended victim.

"Maybe it was a spontaneous attack," Bias said.

"Rufo wore a body-length jumpsuit of waterproof
material over his shirt and pants. There's nothing spontaneous about that. He knew what he was going to do."

"Renko does not look quite so elusive."

"Maybe if he was threatened with a weapon."

"Two weapons."

"No," Ofelia decided, "Rufo had one weapon, the
knife. The needle was the surprise for him." She hurried
because she was a mere detective and Bias was a
pathologist renowned for the rigor of his methodology.
However, she could almost see the fight take place.

 
"You know how the Russian always wears that ridicu
lous coat. I believe the knife pinned the coat to the
bookcase. There is a tear in the lapel of the coat and
there was a coat fiber on the knife. I think that was
when Rufo was killed."

"With the syringe?"

"In self-defense."

Bias took Ofelia's hand, which was slim on the soap-
scented meat of his palm.» What is wonderful about you is your sympathy for the most unlikely people.
Only, this is not an investigation. You and I are merely satisfying our professional curiosity about the physical facts of a death."

"But don't you wonder?"

"No." Bias's expression said he wasn't a sexist, but
that women often lost focus.» You're concerned about the syringe. Very well, we lost one in the lab. Either Renko or Rufo could have stolen it. But why would
Renko? For drugs? I found no drugs in the syringe. He
stole it as a weapon? If he had any fear for his life he
wouldn't have come to Havana. We must be more
sophisticated. For example, consider character. Rufo was
a hustler, an opportunist. He saw the syringe and took
it. Renko is a phlegmatic Russian. Everything for him is
a mental debate, I guarantee you. And there is the
matter of physical force. Ask yourself if Renko thought
he could subdue someone as strong as Rufo. Even in
self-defense."

"Maybe he didn't think, maybe he reacted."

"With a syringe already in his hand? A syringe for
which he had no use? A syringe that ended in Rufo's
grip?"

She withdrew her hand.» Rufo pulled it out of his
head. I would."

"Maybe? Would? You are speculating. Truth reveals itself more to logic than to inspiration." Bias had caught
his breath.» We'll try the reconstruction again. Only,
this time move a little slower. You forget that Renko is
a smoker, probably a drinker, certainly out of condition.
You, on the other hand, are most definitely in shape, younger, more alert. I don't see how he could start to
defend himself. Maybe Rufo slipped. Ready?"

Rufo was not the sort who slipped, Ofelia thought.

She had had a good friend named Maria at the
university. Some years later, Maria married a poet who
declared himself an observer for human rights in
Havana.

Soon Ofelia saw on television that he had been
sentenced to twenty years for assault and that Maria
had been arrested for prostitution. When Ofelia visited
her in jail Maria told a different story. She said that she
had just come out of her house in the morning when a
man grabbed her and started to pull her clothes off at
her own front door. When her husband ran out to
protect her, the man knocked him to the ground and
kicked in his teeth. Only then did a police car appear,
driven by a single officer who took only a statement from the man, who claimed that Maria had propositioned him and, when he turned her down, that her
husband had assaulted him. Maria remembered two
other items: that the backseat of the car was already covered in a plastic sheet and that when the man who
beat her husband got into the front of the patrol car he
picked up two aluminum cigar tubes from the seat and
slipped them into his shirt pocket. The cigars were his,
laid aside for safekeeping. The poet and Maria hanged
themselves in different prisons on the same day. Out of sheer curiosity Ofelia went back and read their arrest
report, which declared that the good citizen who had
come wandering by their door was Rufo Pinero.

Rufo hardly needed one weapon, let alone two.

If the issue of the syringe bothered her and the death
of Maria upset her, the Russian infuriated her. The
arrogance to steal Rufo's key, as if he would even know
what he was looking at in a Cuban's room. To think
that he could stand in front of a map of Havana in
Pribluda's office and see more than a piece of paper.

For Ofelia every street, every corner on the map was a memory. For example, her first school trip to Havana
when she was running hurdles at what used to be the
greyhound track in Miramar, where she returned at
night with Tolomeo Duran and lost her virginity on the
high-jump mat. That was Miramar to her. Or the
theater in Chinatown where her uncle Cucho was knifed
to death in the middle of a pornographic movie. Or the
Coppelia ice-cream parlor on La Rampa where she met
her first husband, Humberto, while they waited three
hours for a spoonful to eat. Or the Floridita bar in
Havana Vieja where she caught Humberto with a Mex
ican woman. More than one marriage had ended
because tourists came prowling for Cuban men. Divorce
was easy in Cuba. She had friends who had been
divorced four or five times. What would a Russian
know about that?

Bias gasped, "Still too fast."

 
Chapter Seven

Havana had sunk into evening shadow, the sea scalloped black, swallows darting through the arcade when Arkady
reached the Malecon. As he went up the stairs he heard
the ground-floor neighbor's radio and not quite a lion's
roar but a definite reverberation.

Slotted light spread from shutters across the walls of
Pribluda's sitting room to the black doll sitting in the
corner, its head tucked away. Perhaps it was the low
angle of sun off the water but the flat seemed subtly
altered: a lower ceiling, wider table, a chair turned a
different direction. Since a kid, Arkady always turned
chairs slightly out from a table as if they carried on a silent conversation. A childish habit, but there it was.

Apart from the door the only access to the apartment
was the balcony and an air shaft midway down the corridor. Even as Arkady turned on lights a power
brownout reduced them to candles. He hung up his
coat in the bedroom closet and stuck his passport in a
shoe while he opened his bag. The shirts were perhaps
folded a little differently.

If there were snoops they hadn't taken any food—
the Russian stockpile in the refrigerator was still com
plete. Arkady poured chilled water from a jar. Dim light
crept from the refrigerator to the glasses on the table,
the turtle's bowl, the glass eyes of the rag doll. Black
paint gave Change not only color but a rough kind of
vigor. Arkady lifted the red bandanna to touch the face,
which was papier-mache molded into crude features,
half-formed mouth about to speak, half-formed nose
about to breathe, half-formed hand about to push off
its walking stick and rise. Dolls should be more insub
stantial, not quite so conscious or as watchful, Arkady
thought. Sweat located his spine. He was going to have
to stop wearing a coat in Havana.